Dipl. Wirt.-Ing. Julius Pfrommer

Fraunhofer IOSB, Germany

Julius Pfrommer is the head of the research group on "Cyberphysical Distributed Systems" at the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB) in Karlsruhe.

The focus of the research group is on distributed control and industrial applications of Machine Learning.

Julius received diploma degrees in industrial engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany and Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France.

He is the frequent author of research papers published in top-tier journals and international conferences and spent time as a visiting reseacher at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

In addition, Julius is the lead architect of the open62541 implementation of OPC UA. Recent additions include support for OPC UA PubSub and the integration with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) for realtime communication.

Abstract

OPC UA is a client-server communication protocol for industrial use cases without hard realtime requirements. The new PubSub extension of OPC UA adds the possibility of many-to-many communication based on the Publish/Subscribe paradigm.

In conjunction with the upcoming Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) extensions of Ethernet, OPC UA PubSub aims to also cover time-deterministic connectivity. This poses requirements to OPC UA implementations that have traditionally not been regarded. We propose an approach to combine non-realtime OPC UA servers with realtime OPC UA PubSub publishers where both can access a shared information model without the loss of realtime guarantees for the publisher. As a result, the publisher can be run inside a (hardware-triggered) interrupt to ensure short delays and small jitter. An open source implementation of OPC UA PubSub is provided based on the open62541 SDK. This is also the basis for measurements used to evaluate the potential of the technology.